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Almost exactly 17 years after it was first released, the iconic indie game Castle Crashers has just received a brand new DLC that opens up the floodgates for custom characters.
When you think of the golden era of Xbox Live Arcade and the early days of indie games, you no doubt harken back to the Summer of Arcade promotion, which gave us a selection of all-timers like Bastion, Braid, Limbo, and Bionic Commando Rearmed. And in that very first year Castle Crashers arrived on the scene on August 27, 2008, and a few weeks removed from being exactly 17 years later, the game has received a new batch of DLC – exclusively on Steam.
Titled Painter Boss Paradise, the new Castle Crashers DLC expansion follows the format of the older DLC packs by adding new knights to the game. While previous DLC packs have included the likes of Pink Knight and a Blacksmith; the new edition adds iconic Castle Crashers characters to the playable roster like Adam Sandler, Peter Griffin, Doom Slayer, and a Job Application.
That is to say, unofficially, because the Painter Boss Paradise DLC includes the ability to create custom characters in the game, alongside custom weapons and shields. But more crucially, it opens up Steam Workshop support, which allows the community to pop their own creations up.
A glance at the page currently shows the likes of Hideo Kojima (who holds a Monster Can sword and a PS5 box of Death Stranding 2 as a shield), Dr House, and a Shoebill which are literally just JPEGs put onto knight bodies, while there's also a ton of adaptations of video game characters like Master Chief, Dante, and Link in the Castle Crashers style.
Granted, these characters are locked to the pre-defined movesets of previous Castle Crashers characters, so sadly this won't become quite as elaborate as Rivals of Aether's Workshop support, which has had people make full Smash Bros-style movesets for the likes of Obama, Hotel Mario's version of Mario, and Duane – a dancing child from a 1989 direct-to-video film titled Barbie Dance Club.
